Ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. This web site is my attempt to document, from my perspective, these "interesting times".

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Re-framing the War on Terror

One bit of framing advice to Democrats has been to avoid using the term "War on Terror". Doing so just re-affirms the Bush conception of the war we are in. But how do you talk about this war without using this all purpose, commonly accepted term?

The first way is to divide the war into its component parts, thus highlighting the contrast between the different conflicts. Refer to it as the "War in Afghanistan" and the "War in Iraq". This highlights the fact that they are separate conflicts that need to be justified separately.

The second way is to re-emphasize the reason we got into this conflict in the first place. This all stared with the attacks on September 11th. Thus, any conflict we get into must be justified on the basis of redress for that attack. We are in a war that is a response to 9/11. Therefore, this is the "9/11 War".